1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to telecommunications and, in particular, to call hold centers. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to managing caller hold times across multiple hold queues according to authenticated caller identifiers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many companies provide telephone-based access to help staff, sales personnel, representatives, and automated menus via a call center. Where high telephone call traffic is typical in telephone access to a company's representatives, a PBX system receives the call and distributes the call to an automatic call distributor (ACD), thus incorporating a hold function in the call center. ACDs are often employed to provide an even and systematic distribution of incoming calls to multiple representatives. In particular, ACDs typically provide incoming calls with a direct connection to an available representative until all representatives are busy. Then, calling parties are placed in a call queue, and selectively connected to a representative once a representative comes available.
Call queues may cause frustration and ill will of consumers towards a company, particularly where excessively long waits, full queues and accidental disconnects are encountered. One way to alleviate some of the frustration associated with call queues is by specifying services and information provided to the caller while a caller waits in a call queue. For example, automated messages output to a caller, while the caller is on hold in a call hold queue, may be specified according to the products owned by a caller, the caller's expertise and messages that have been previously played to the caller while on hold.
However, call systems are limited in that each individual call center stores an individual profile for specifying services, requiring a caller to enter a new profile at each call center; requiring a new profile entry at each call center is time consuming and cancels the advantages of specified output. In addition, a caller may only call an individual call center one time, store a profile with the individual call center, and never call the individual call center again to take advantage of the logged profile, thus wasting resources and time.
A further disadvantage of current hold queue systems is that where multiple queues are selectable within a hold queue system, the caller may not always select the proper queue or may need to access multiple representatives where accessing each of the representatives requires waiting in a separate queue within a single call. In such cases, the caller will wait in a first queue to speak to a first representative, only to find out that the caller must wait in an additional queue to speak to a second representative.
Therefore, in view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide a method, system, and program for storing and managing caller profiles including hold times within a call center at a single remote caller profile server that distributes the caller profiles to multiple call centers and multiple hold queues within a single or multiple call centers. In addition, in view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to preserve a caller's current time investment in a call center in order to adjust a caller's position in each hold queue in that call center and across multiple call centers dependent upon previous hold queue times.